Warfield Lecturer Willie Jennings Reimagines the Doctrine of Creation

In the latest episode of the Theology for Our Times podcast, Willie Jennings joins guest host and CTI resident member Elise Edwards to discuss his spring 2026 Princeton Theological Seminary Warfield Lecture Series entitled Only Then Will We Build: Forming a Real Doctrine of Creation. The conversation offers a sustained critique of prevailing approaches to the doctrine of creation and proposes a constructive reorientation that emphasizes place, embodiment, and relationality.

Jennings’s principal claim is that modern Christian doctrines of creation have been fundamentally misdirected. Rather than attending to lived existence, they have been preoccupied with questions of origins—how the world began and how God relates to those beginnings. While not dismissing such questions, Jennings argues that this focus has distracted the doctrine from its proper subject: life “on the ground.” A sound doctrine of creation, he contends, should address how human beings inhabit the world, relate to other creatures, and participate in the ongoing work of building shared life under God.

This reorientation prioritizes practice over abstraction and foregrounds that creation is not simply a past event but an ongoing, participatory reality. Jennings observes that this shift aligns with his understanding of human beings as called to an “artisanal” mode of existence that involves building, weaving, and cultivating forms of life in communion with other creatures. Jennings evocatively describes this theological anthropology as “being with God in the dirt,” conveying at once the materiality of human existence and the significance of God’s uniting the divine life with God’s creation through the incarnation.

Jennings identifies the modern condition of “displacement” as a primary obstacle to recovering a sound doctrine of creation. Describing contemporary people as “geographically adrift,” Jennings maintains that contemporary ethics reduces morality to individual volition and obscures the values, responsibilities, and virtues that arise from relationships with land, community, and nonhuman life. The result is a disembodied moral vision that “lives in no place.” In a kindred vein, Jennings draws on Latin American decolonial theory to critique the epistemological posture he terms “zero-point thinking,” a mode of thought that conceives of knowledge as originating from a neutral, universal standpoint and thereby obscures its contextuality. Jenkins counters that Christian theology should not begin with assertion but listening and learning from others, especially those whose lives are deeply rooted in particular places. He provocatively suggests that even the incarnation models this posture since in Jesus, God comes not as a teacher imposing knowledge but as a learner formed within a specific community and environment.

Jennings’ reoriented doctrine of creation also provides the context for his engagement with anthropologist Tim Ingold’s distinction between “transport” and “wayfaring.” Modern life, structured by efficiency and mobility, treats movement as the mere transfer of bodies between destinations. Wayfaring, by contrast, emphasizes attentive movement within and through place. Jennings uses this framework to criticize contemporary ecclesiology. Many churches, he argues, function as “destination sites”—disconnected from their surrounding environments—rather than as “knots” where the lived trajectories of people intersect. This disconnection contributes to the current crisis of church identity, especially as congregations grapple with declining membership and the maintenance of underused buildings.

Relatedly, Jennings maintains that modern property relations distort Christian understandings of creation by encouraging a view of the world as inert and possessable rather than as belonging to God—not as property but as an extension of divine life. According to Jennings, the logic of ownership not only occludes creation’s animate and relational character; it facilitates creation’s exploitation. As an alternative, he highlights the practice of sharing illustrated in the story of Zacchaeus as a means of “crumbling” ownership structures from within. Jennings extends his critique of property to the concept of stewardship, which he regards as entangled with notions of ownership, and commends in its stead a Christian environmental ethic of care based on reciprocity. Given a doctrine of creation wherein human beings participate in a web of mutual giving and receiving, Jennings contends that environmental ethics should replace pretensions of management and control with relationality.

Finally, Jennings describes his doctrine of creation’s implications for theological anthropology. By reconnecting bodily existence with the materiality of land, Jennings’s notion of “bone and dirt” challenges the dualisms that separate human identity from ecological context. Furthermore, the incarnation, in which God assumes “dirt flesh,” affirms the enduring significance of material existence. For Jennings, this has profound implications: if God is eternally bound to the material world, then creation cannot be treated as disposable or exploitable.

Cumulatively, Jennings’ radical reimagining of the doctrine of creation supplants longstanding assumptions about knowledge, ownership, and human identity with an ecological, communal, and incarnational theology that is rooted in place, shaped by practices of listening and learning, and oriented toward the cultivation of shared, flourishing life.

Willie James Jennings is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale Divinity School.